Friday, June 24, 2011

SEO Friendly Navigation Tips for bloggers

Good navigation on your blog helps users to quickly find information they want. That’s a fundamental principle of success for bloggers.

The blog title should reflect the theme of your blog clearly. This title is visible to users on the reverse bar of the browser. Users quickly connect to the theme or navigate away from your blog. So write a clear title with four or five words that reflect the content of your blog.

Tip: Search engines drop most visitors on your home page, so get your categories, most popular and archives or the tag cloud up there. You start getting more traffic to inner pages after substantial content has been posted and promoted.

Categorize your posts clearlyMany bloggers don’t know how to lead their users to the rich content they have published on their blog. Visitors are most certainly searching for something when they land up on your site. Categories are what point to the stuff you have for them. They also enable users to go through additional information on the subject of interest. While categorizing use words that are instantly recognizable.

This categorization enables users to quickly open the one they are looking for and read the content. It also tells searchers about the other relevant content you have on your blog.

Social Media LinksThe social media buttons for sharing, “About Me”, RSS feeds, subscription to newsletter, social bookmarks and search bar must be available at a visible location on the blog home.

Text links on your home pageUse clear text links since users and search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing understand them well. Flash and fancy images don’t convey your content very well to the crawlers.

Use simple layoutsThe blog design also determines how people see your content. Keep it simple and easily navigable. Let visitors get the information they seek in 5 seconds. Throwing complex designs, dark colours, falsh or images that don’t mean much is sheer waste of your prime real estate.

Navigation bars for showcasing contentUse the right or left navigation bar that blogging platforms like typepad, blogger, wordpress, etc provide. This bar can have all your categories in the order of importance for the visitor – categories, tag clouds, recent posts, popular posts, archives, about me etc.

Make it easy for readers to find the content they want and success is yours.